Et In Arkadia Ego

After Jordan Bloom tells the tale of the $5 million animatronic zoo cum children’s chapel for a San Antonio megachurch, Rod Dreher points out that it’s not the cost that staggers ($5 million for these churches is relatively pocket change), but the purpose—cultural relevance. The idea is to compete with theme parks and pizzerias for the kids’ attention so they’ll stay for the Word of God.

John Hagee is your average megachurch the-end-is-nigh, bless-Israel-so-you-may-be-blessed prosperity preacher, with an aging choir, a corpulent belly, a multimillion dollar TV ministry, a son groomed to take over the empire, and a massive retirement package. He needs your pity more than anything.

With room for 850 boisterous children cascading over the room, it’s hard to imagine those wonderful toys surviving long, but it’s not all bad. The model Noah’s ark is at least a rudimentary architectural symbol of the congregation’s theology, which is more than can be said for the main stadium, which only says that the guy standing down at the bottom middle with the mic is really important and you’d better listen to him.

But it’s a skin-deep symbolism. The electronic elephant symbolizes…a live elephant. It was important to the ark designer “that it really feel more real than just a playground.” “We never wanted a curtain to look behind. No place where it gave it away,” he said. Of course there is a curtain, the plastic which covers the hydraulic innards. A kid who can’t find the curtain (and they will try) is impressed by the design quality, but that’s more reason to believe in the ingenuity of technicians than in the providence of God. That’s why pastor Hagee acknowledges that their real value is entertainment. We wonder how long it will be before the kids get bored and start demanding to see pterodactyls nesting on the church rooftop. The cleverer ones will have overthrown the entire enterprise as soon as they ask “so how did all the animals on the earth fit into this ark? And didn’t the animals come in two by two?”

The power of sacred architecture is in the fitting combination of its beauty and its meaning. Hagee’s chapel is gaudily commercial and theologically spare, powerless to move the soul to God. His church has nothing to say, and no idea how to say it. The larger story here is that the parents and retirees who paid for the building are raising children who are bored with church, and a pachyderm playground is their best idea to get the little ones’ attention.

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6 Responses to Et In Arkadia Ego

Yeah, this kind of thing is simply a matter of money looking for a place to be spent. It’s the evangelical megachurch equivalent of carrying a Hermes bag.

To be fair, when I took my son and some friends (when he was in late elementary school, Catholic no less) to San Diego for the “Treasures of the Papacy” exhibit, he said afterwards, “That’s all about money and power.” And indeed it was. One more reason to make sure you really have a sacred art and a sacred architecture, something the West has not had (at least in majority culture) since the Renaissance.

I too snicker at this, but then you have to admit to the endurance of this sort of faith, and maybe even check oneself a bit:

There is, after all, nothing different here from what Mencken described going on about the outskirts of Dayton during the Scopes trial. And that had gone on a long time before and Scopes’ trial took place way back in 1925, and we’ve just finished what had to be about *the* most secular-influenced century ever (two world wars neither of which was fought over religion, and etc.), and yet … here those sorts of folks still are.

One supposes they just don’t know what else to believe in—or as Taylor says, their church has nothing to say—but looking back at the actual *product* of that great last secular century, well … who is certain of *their* answers to secularism’s little problems? Like WWI and WWII?

It’s a funny thing, but broadly speaking (very broadly), the religious perspective about things has a leg up in many ways to the purely secular. It is, after all, the religious that tends to promise heaven/nirvana/perfection only at *some* point in the unknown and very possibly far-off future. And yet just in case you weren’t paying attention it’s the most militant secularists who run around telling us that if only we do X that heaven on earth is (always) right around the corner. (And yet cannot give any ultimate reason whatsoever why we should do X, or not do X, or refrain from doing anything at all.)

And what of the explanatory power of secularism? How to explain a Hitler, or the death of a child? With a defiant reference to whatever “obsession” or “pathological” means, or to an utterly indifferent (and therefore hopeless) nature? With these supposedly telling us more that matters than the idea of “evil” does? Or the idea of the unknowability of God’s will?

We are very very early in the secular age. And while I’m the first to find it difficult, it might not be a bad idea to remain at least a bit modest if not fearful about it.

Fran,
Got anything more than Luther’s polemics to back up that claim? Or is it only in-crowd “knowledge?”

Note that I wholeheartedy accept the corruption of the Catholic church, both in the late middle ages and early modern period, and now as well. But claims like that (comparative and specific) deserve something larger and better than mere assertion, at least in my opinion.